The cardboard world of (but not in any way affiliated with) the New York Mets

Category Archives: Site News

Now that I have your attention…

The votes are in (all four of them) and it’s been decided – I’m not going to do what you want me to do. The general consensus is that the cool kids are on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and like news/opinion and pictures. I don’t do news (not the real kind at least), I already have too much opinion content, and I never saw the point of Facebook, so that leaves us with pictures and Instagram. There’s just something about Instagram’s obsession with squares and image degradation that offends my photographic sensibilities. And I already give you a lot of pictures between this site and Twitter as it is. So this little exercise has gotten us nowhere.

But that was kind of the point. After all, why should I put effort into reaching out to the people I’m already reaching with my current efforts? What I need to do is reach the people who aren’t finding me via Twitter and the web, so Facebook and Instagram are a bit redundant. If Google+ is is unused as its non-users say, that leaves us with tumblr and Pinterest. I’m afraid that my lack of My Little Pony and/or recipe content will rule those out as potential media platforms, though Topps has just recently set up shop on tumblr. That means that either Topps is on top of the latest trends or tumblr is on its way out.

We’ll keep tumblr in the running for now to appease the bronies. To make it interesting though, we’ll need to look at a few media trends and see if there are any good fits with the kind of content that I produce (or that I should be producing…). First, let’s see what current content you like and/or are aware of:

What Collect the Mets content do you find useful?

Product reviews (need to do more of these...)

Historical information (player spotlights, hobby history, etc.)

Game-used memorabilia and autograph references (menus at the top of the page)

And now you should see where I’m going with this. One of the biggest trends in the hobby is the rise of case breaking videos. If you can’t get a big hit yourself, I guess the next best thing is seeing someone else pull it out of a pack. Case breaking is big business because it is essentially gambling. If you pay $120 for the Dominic Smith autograph slot in a 5-case break of Bowman Draft Picks & Prospects, you could get hundreds of dollars worth of cards. Or you could walk away with a $20 base autograph while the guy who paid $20 for the Andrew Church autograph slot cashes in with a base, refractor, and orange refractor autograph. Either way, the guy who opened it all probably made a decent profit so a few people could get great deals and a few others could get nothing. Which is basically what gambling is.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, I’m not getting into case breaking, so that’s out. If people are willing to sit around and spend six hours watching strangers open packs, then there has to be some way to come up with video content that people will enjoy. Even if it’s just the canine UFC that breaks out in my living room every night…

People seem to like visual content, so how about a podcast? (That there is what we like to call “irony,” please make note of how that works.) It seems like everyone has a podcast these days where they drone on and on about which prospects they like or what they drink to make talking about the Mets more tolerable. Would that make sense for the Collect the Mets brand?

With five questions, four of you will determine the way forward for this site in year three

Hello, reader. It’s been a while since we last chatted. How’s it going? Did you have a good Thanksgiving? Get any good Black Friday deals? Great, great. We need to do this more often. So why don’t you help me figure out how better to interact with you and deliver the high-value content you want?

According to a recent study, only 2% of your Twitter followers will click on a link you tweet. My own site stats back up those numbers, though pointing that out in a tweet that was then retweeted by Matt Cerrone doubled those numbers (RT-baiting is a bit of an art form). So how else can you promote your site? Beats me, but I’ve heard of a few things that I haven’t been particularly motivated to learn more about. And that’s where you come in.

Tell me what you want, what you oh hell no I’m not doing a Spice Girls reference

In case you missed it, my first Reader Poll revealed that I have a reader! [Update: It’s up to 4, woo! And back to one after I replaced the polling system.] Now, dear reader, you have a chance to shape the content over the next year, in so far as your opinions happen to match up with what I end up doing. Hey, you get what you pay for and I’m the only one paying for this site. I love free marketing data though, so please fill out this survey honestly (or at least humorously) and maybe your voice will be heard. Unless nobody fills this out, in which case I’ll just interpret that as a vote of confidence in whatever I’m doing. Interpreting data is fun.

Now with content!

If you were viewing this site a year ago, well, there wouldn’t have been much here. More likely, the URL wouldn’t resolve and you wouldn’t have been viewing anything. I guess it didn’t take much to improve over last year if last year didn’t exist.

With that said, the state of the site is, well, incomplete. While the various colors and styles of Mets uniforms are more or less covered, things never progressed beyond that. There’s still 29 other teams (30 if you count the Nationals and Expos separately) plus All-Star, Futures Game, and WBC teams, among others. And then there’s all of the non-uniform material: jackets, hats, shoes, fielding gloves, batting gloves, catching equipment, etc.

And bats! Those should be up early in the coming year along with the last of the 2012 product reviews and the thrilling conclusion to Upper Deck: A Love Story. There’s plenty more content to look forward to, whenever I get around to wrapping some of it up.

In case you’ve lost track of what content has gone up in the last year or so, I put together a Site Index to keep everything organized. You can get to it from the tabs at the top of each page. Speaking of the tabs, they’ve been updated to match the 2013 uniforms, sort of. Black is gone and the road grays and home/road blues have taken over.

As for the rest of the site design, well, not much has changed there. The sidebar is still a mess and I don’t think the comment boxes are quite right, but the lack of comments has hidden that problem. The sidebar on the other hand, well, that needs work. There are also more than a few other sites and blogs that I want to link to, but it’s going to look like a big mess if I can’t figure out how to present everything.

Content in general hasn’t quite gone as planned. Current products took priority over older products and for some reason game recaps became a big part of this site. What’s up with that? I think the game recaps are here to stay (even if they aren’t strictly on topic), but there should be more coverage of older baseball card products as I get more scanning done. I’m not sure what else we’ll see in the coming year, but I’m bad at predicting this sort of thing anyway. I guess it’ll be a surprise to all of us!

I never did post a decoder ring for my game-used material codes, did I? I should probably make that a priority before it gets too confusing. Rest assured though, the jumble of lettering does make some sort of logical sense. That should become apparent as more styles of material are added.

You do know that there’s an archive of game-used material in here, right? Check the Uniforms tab up at the top. I haven’t exactly been advertising it, so I’m guessing that it gets overlooked a lot.

Elsewhere, there’s been some good progress in establishing a place in the fan community. The Collect the Mets Twitter account passed 100 followers a while back, though I’m pretty sure most of them don’t visit the site, so I’m not sure what to make of that. Twitter has given me an avenue to interact with influential people and companies though. To date, several prominent blogs/bloggers, card companies, and other individuals have taken notice of what I’ve been doing through following on Twitter, retweeting, linking to posts, etc. It’s nothing all that big, but it’s gotten me into the discussion, which is all I’m really after. After a wait of about 10 months, I also received membership in the Baseball Bloggers Alliance. It’s not exactly the BBWAA, but then again it’s not the BBWAA.

So that’s where things are at. Stuff happened, stuff will happen. Wow, this is a pretty sorry state of affairs. Everything has to start somewhere though and we’ll just have to move forward from here. Thanks for your support over the past year and check back in a week for all of the year-end wrap-up posts I can get out the door by New Year’s!